Chapter 363 |
Argonaut (3)
Galahad was at the top floor of the tower, the 13th Tier.
So who occupied the 12th Tier, the one closest to the top? Learning the answer, Najin could not help but smile.
From the moment he entered the sanctuary of Oblivion, where forgotten memories gathered, and again when he first stepped into the tower where forgotten heroes had collected, a thought had crossed his mind: maybe.
Maybe he would meet someone here again.
Half a hunch confirmed when he met Blue Spear, that instinct had now become certainty. Najin climbed. He passed the 10th Tier and walked into the 11th, and that was when people who recognized him began appearing one by one.
"That swordsmanship, are you by any chance..."
They said a name when they saw Najin's technique.
"Is the name attached to that technique Horn Charge, by any chance? I once met someone in this tower who used an identical technique..."
"Yes, that's right."
He kept walking.
"The lance I carry is called the Lance of the Crossed Star, and the banner fixed to my shoulder is the battle standard of the Golden Horn Knights."
He climbed the tower.
"The swordsmanship I practice is called Triumph, and its founder is Aldaran Vasaglia, the First Horn of the Empire, from a hundred and fifty years ago."
He passed the 11th Tier and headed for the 12th.
"And I am..."
Floor 129.
"..."
Najin's steps stopped. Where they stopped, there were knights. Each carried a single spear on their back, and every one of them wore a horned helm.
A knight order of thirteen.
At their center stood the one whose horned helm shone the brightest. He sat perched on a rock, a single sword at his hip. He raised his head, and all thirteen knights looked at Najin.
"I am."
Standing before them, Najin rapped his pauldron with his fist. With a clank of metal, he smiled.
"Captain of the Golden Horn Knights and pillar of the Empire."
He spoke his name before the assembled order.
"Dawn Horn, Najin."
2.
The moment Najin gave his name, silence fell across floor 129. What broke it was the sound of one knight snapping his head around, his helm rattling, and then the sharp clack of a visor flying up.
"Captain, I won the bet, didn't I? I said it! I said if it was anything like what the Captain described, that guy would definitely make it here!"
Taking that as their cue, the knights began lifting visors or pulling off helms one by one.
"Never in my life did I think I'd see Kalven win a bet. Well, the odds were in his favor this time, I suppose."
"A true knight could never abandon this place. Say, Captain, seems you raised quite a disciple? One look and you can tell he's got the right bearing."
"Disciple of who? The disciple of that stubborn captain who swore up and down he'd never take one."
They were shouting at each other, then they started drifting toward Najin. All of them, without exception, save for the Helmeted Knight still sitting in place and the knight standing silently at his side, all eleven came forward.
"Well, look at this coat! Is this not the Free Knight's coat? Good heavens! I've spent my whole life wanting to wear one of these..."
"Would you like to try it on?"
"What? Really, I can?"
The knight who immediately began stripping off his armor was named Kalven. Despite his companions trying to drag him back, he tore off his armor anyway and pulled on the coat Najin offered.
"Hhhh."
He sucked in a sharp breath the moment he put it on.
"The fabric is magnificent. And the finish, how can it be this perfect? If I'd walked through the capital in this, the ladies would have gone absolutely mad. Damn it, if only I'd had this coat, I could have proposed to that young lady..."
As Kalven lamented the great regret of his life, the knight standing beside him snorted.
"One correction: you still wouldn't have managed it even with that coat. Has it not always been said that the face is what completes a man's appearance? Take a look at your face, then take a look at his."
Kalven peered at his own reflection in the polished surface of his breastplate, then shot a sideways glance at Najin's face. The gap between them was roughly the distance between a Sword Seeker and a Sword Master.
"...Damn it."
"Good. Now you understand."
With that, Kalven was pushed aside and a knight stepped forward, introducing himself as Paragon. He gave Najin a salute with proper form.
"My name is Paragon. It is an honor to meet the next captain of the Golden Horn Knights. Please forgive Kalven, he has few manners, but that is simply how he is."
"I do not mind at all."
"Then we are grateful. Allow me to introduce our order..."
He pointed to each of the other knights in turn and gave their names. After introducing all eleven, he hesitated a moment, then put a question to Najin.
"Sir Najin? If I may ask one thing, the last news we heard from our Captain was that you were attempting to bring down the Carnival King. Would it be possible to hear how that ended?"
"Of course."
All eleven knights fell silent, waiting for Najin's next words. In their eyes Najin could sense tension, anticipation, fear.
Of course they were afraid.
To the Golden Horn Knights, the Carnival King would have been something like a waking nightmare. A demon that had swallowed all twelve of their number whole and had nearly swallowed their captain as well. To them, the word "arch-nemesis" was not even adequate.
Knowing that.
"Well, naturally."
Najin answered with a smile.
"I won. I brought her down one on one."
He snapped his fingers. With Merlin's help, he showed them a single scene from his mind's eye: the moment the Dawn Sword's Absolute Technique cut through the Carnival King's throat.
"The Carnival King's head is still hanging on the Empire's first pillar. I cut it off quite neatly, it's a little disappointing I can't show you in person."
The instant Najin said that, one knight breathed out in relief, another clenched a fist, and another swept a hand down over their face and pressed their lips tight together.
"Finally. Finally..."
Paragon murmured that, pressing two fingers to his brow. Then he dropped to one knee before Najin. On one knee he offered the fullest respect he could, bowing his head low.
It was not only Paragon.
All eleven knights expressed their respect in their own ways. Paragon spoke on behalf of them all.
"We have heard what you did for our Captain, and for us. We offer you our deepest respects for the effort you have made, for fulfilling our long-held wish and for carrying the Golden Horn Knights forward."
The clatter of armor shifting rang out as they stepped aside. Through the gap they opened, Najin looked ahead. There sat the Helmeted Knight on his rock, watching him, and beside him stood the silent knight.
"Please, go ahead."
The story between us can wait.
The knights parted to let him through, and Najin walked toward the Helmeted Knight. Only then did the Helmeted Knight move, but the movement was small.
He turned his head slightly to look at Najin standing before him. That was all. No sign of delight, no flicker of recognition. Najin felt thrown off by that. He had imagined many possible reactions from the Helmeted Knight upon meeting again, but not this one.
"Najin? Come over here for a moment."
The silence was broken not by the Helmeted Knight but by Crünbell.
3.
"First of all, it is good to see you, Najin."
A short distance from the Helmeted Knight, Crünbell spoke with Najin alone. His appearance and his voice felt quite unfamiliar. Crünbell seemed to notice the stare and gave a slight smile.
"I suppose this is the first time you have seen me with a head?"
"...Do you remember?"
"Not precisely. Between having no head and the wear of long years, all I retain is the fact that we clashed at full force."
He took off his helm. A young man's face, clean in impression. It was a rude thought, but seeing Crünbell with a head attached felt strangely out of place to Najin.
"This is a little embarrassing, really."
Crünbell scratched the back of his neck with a sheepish look.
"I am not sure what image of me you carry in your memory, but I suspect it was one that did not suit the title of Silent Knight. I was among the restless dead, shrieking and rampaging."
He reached down and touched the horn pipe at his hip, that signature instrument of his.
"I forgot myself, and I was forgotten by history. I am told that thanks to you, I met an end befitting a knight in my final moments, and yet... I never reclaimed myself to the last."
That was true. He had shown a knight's pride at the very end, but Crünbell had met death while still among the dead.
"So the me that exists here is whole. I have both my own memories and an understanding of how the world outside came to remember me."
But, Crünbell said.
"The Captain is not the same."
He pointed at the Helmeted Knight sitting on the rock.
"We have watched the Captain here for a long time, and throughout that time the Captain's memories repeatedly slipped away and came back. Almost as though in a tug-of-war with the Captain outside."
A tug-of-war, was how he put it.
"To say it another way, it means the Captain outside was also losing and regaining memories over and over. That was proof the Captain outside was struggling, fighting against the forgetting."
Thanks to that, everyone here knows your story. He said as much, and Crünbell smiled a rueful smile.
"Every time the Captain's memories flowed in here, the Captain would talk about you with great enthusiasm."
"About me?"
"Yes. You cannot imagine how happily the Captain spoke. Said a disciple had been taken on who was nothing short of a monster. Called you an infuriating wretch who learned ten things from being taught only one, and praised you endlessly."
"Is that actually praise? It does not sound like it..."
"Ha. You know how it is, don't you? The Captain has never been generous with compliments. Still... the Captain looked happy telling those stories. And we were able to enjoy them too."
Because.
"Here, where nothing but past failures had piled up, the Captain was looking at the present."
Crünbell looked at Najin.
"Listening to your stories, we laughed. We held our breath. And I am embarrassed to admit it, but when I heard that you had finally beaten me and mastered the Horn Charge, I stood up and cheered."
And that was not all.
"When you broke through the Captain's stubbornness and finally made the Captain draw a sword. When the Captain decided to teach you. When the Captain took off the helm and came to see themselves as a knight..."
Crünbell was visibly pleased as he laid out the stories he had heard from the Helmeted Knight. He smiled and nodded.
"The joy we felt in that final moment when the Captain reclaimed themselves, I cannot put it into words."
"..."
"I have talked too long. In any case, this is what I wanted to say. Unlike me, unlike us, the Captain reclaimed the self in that last moment. The Captain died as Aldaran Vasaglia, with all memories intact."
Crünbell tapped his own temple.
"Because of that, the Captain here has no 'memories of Aldaran Vasaglia.' They existed here once, but the Captain outside took them."
Aldaran Vasaglia had met a complete death.
In that final moment he had remembered everything, reclaimed himself, and died not as the Carnival King's jester or as one of the dead, but as the First Horn of the Empire. So the memories of Aldaran do not exist here in the Domain of Forgetting.
The Aldaran outside had taken them away.
"The outside me is calling me. Those were the last words the Captain left, and then closed his eyes. In that final moment, the Captain was smiling."
"Then what is sitting over there..."
Najin turned his gaze.
He looked at Aldaran sitting on the rock and recalled what the heroes here had told him. The heroes of this place were made of two elements, because there were two things Guinevere had taken from them.
The first was the heroes' own memories. The second was the very awareness of how that era had recorded and remembered them. Those two together formed the existence of the heroes gathered here.
Aldaran had resisted the forgetting to the end and reclaimed his own memories. One of the two had been recovered.
Then.
Najin looked at Crünbell, and he nodded as though to confirm the guess.
"Yes. The Captain here is composed not of personal memories, but solely of the world's awareness of the being known as Aldaran Vasaglia."
The Empire's first pillar.
The driving force of the Dawn War.
The great hero who brought countless wars to an end and finally put a close to an age of strife, who had pulled that entire era forward. A hundred and fifty years ago, the world had called him this.
"War hero, Aldaran Vasaglia."
The sum of the world's awareness of that hero. History itself made flesh.
That was the true nature of the figure sitting there.